Mormons are a bit strange that way. I had a Mormon roommate for two years who allowed herself to have coca-cola during finals week. I always think back on that when I hear about how Mittens said he once took a sip of beer and then felt terrible about it.

One the one hand, I hear about all the things he plans on doing and it frightens me, but on the other, I remember how just a few years ago he was a pro-choice (politically, not personally) moderate. He does whatever will make him the most popular, and flip-flops based on the voices yelling at him. Right now he's trying to win over the extreme right, but should he actually be president, I'm not sure he'd actually do everything he said he would. He might flip-flop all over again if polls showed that he would get the most amount of citizen support if he changed his position on everything.

I'm also worried that if he were to be president, we're gonna go through that whole ordeal we went through with Bush where everyone's embarrassed to admit we're from the U.S. because they can't present themselves well overseas. Mitt's already made an international fool of himself.

Genuine question from an external observer. How difficult would it be for an independent/minority party to get into party. Not a majority position, but a role of influence. Is the system too stacked towards the two party system these days?

Pretty difficult. There have been independents in Congress, both in the Senate and House of Rep., but currently there are just 2 independent senators. There have also been independent governors, but currently we only have 1. I don't think there have every been any other minor party politicians in any roles of influence, at least not since the U.S. became pretty established as a two party system. It really is too stacked towards being a two party system, unfortunately.

There are many different "3rd Party" office holders on the local and state level across the country. It becomes a problem in national politics because so many people are invested in the current two major parties, which have decades long histories. If any third party candidate ever becomes even remotely popular on a national level (in recent presidential races those would be Ross Perot and Ralph Nader) all they can even remotely hope to do is peel some voters away from the national party that is most closely aligned with their goals (in Perot's case it was Republicans, in Nader's Democrats) so, best case scenario for a third party candidate is that they hamstring the mainstream party candidate most closely aligned with their goals and effectively hand the election over to the other party, insuring their goals are not only not achieved, but rather actively worked against for 4 years.

So, it is really self-defeating to run a 3rd party presidential candidate.

The only way 3rd Parties can influence Presidential elections is by aligning themselves with one of the two major parties and through internal maneuvers pull that party in the direction they want it to go. The Tea Party has done this with the Republicans in a way the Green Party persists in failing to do with the Democrats as the Tea Party chose alignment while the Greens keep choosing opposition.

None of that is going to change any time soon and people dissatisfied with it need to pick the one of the two that are closer to their desire, help that one win and keep pushing from the inside to get that one to move in directions they want it to. Any other course is effectively capitulation to the worst of your opposition.

In a secretly-recorded video made at a closed-door fundraiser with fellow millionaires,, Mitt Romney shoved his foot so far into this mouth that the toe of this shoes poked out his ass.

During a private fundraiser earlier this year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a small group of wealthy contributors what he truly thinks of all the voters who support President Barack Obama. He dismissed these Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, who don't assume responsibility for their lives, and who think government should take care of them. Fielding a question from a donor about how he could triumph in November, Romney replied:

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax."

Romney went on: "[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

American politics doesn't need a single third party; it needs four parties. Each of the two major parties has an extreme wing represented by an existing party. The Republicans have pretty much rejected Libertarian politics as a cancer in their midst, and that wing should just get peeled off and cede the Republican party to the Southern White Christian Male party.

Similarly, the Green party / Naderite wing of the Democratic party has very little to do with the business-friendly soft progressivism of Clinton and Obama, and should also fully spin off into its own viable party.

I realize both of these parties technically exist, but because of winner-take-all electoral laws, there's no hope of getting proportional representation of these parties' interests on a national scale. The U.S. electoral system forces large blocs of votes and actively works against any sort of parliamentary representation.

A third party may *replace* one of the existing two parties, as happened to the Whigs, but until the electoral system is reformed, there will never be any sort of vibrant 'third party' movement that is viable on a national scale without simply robbing from and replacing one of the other two parties.

It actually doesn't have to get nasty. The Obama camp can just continue to govern and watch the Romney team tear itself apart trying to wriggle themselves out of this.

If the President really wants to stick the knife in, he doesn't need to say a word about Romney. All he needs to do is give a speech, or an answer to a press question, in which he talks about the 47% who pay no income tax, (though most of them do pay payroll taxes! As he is sure they know better than he does!) because they are old, and have contributed over long lives, so now have earned a well deserved break, or working poor and in need of every dollar to lift themselves out of poverty, or middle-class working families with one parent working and the other raising two kids, who make so little that their exemptions cancel out their tax, or students, preparing for the future... people America believes in, and is willing to invest in. Our families, friends and neighbors. Half of the country. Americans that he has worked every day for the past 4 years to insure have a brighter, healthier, more prosperous future.

The end.

The Romney campaign will walk another two weeks on stumps before they even realize how neatly he sliced them off at the knees.

The sheer venemous lilt to Romney's voice when he said the word *entitled* is the most revealing part to me. They're called entitlements for a reason. Yes, the poor *are* entitled to some basic level of help...that's what the law says. It isn't a filthy word.

The Republicans do want to lower taxes, and some extremists want no taxes. Romney likes to play the whole "well we should have just a tiny bit of taxes, only a smidge" game while using the 47% as a scapegoat for all of America's problems because, as people who don't pay taxes (which is a misnomer, as Oddbill pointed out), they are freeloading off the government and basically being societal parasites. Which is a crock of shit given the fact that Romney keeps his money in the Cayman Islands so he can avoid paying taxes when he can well afford them :|

Mitt Romney has this unusual retirement account--despite being legally limited to contributions of $30k/yr, his IRA is valued at "somewhere around 20 to 100 million dollars." What I've read, from speculation about how and why on the part of other investors and former colleagues, is that this probably happened by taking a $30k investment, sticking it in the fund, and having it grow over the years.

A lot of people are confused about why he would do this. Taxes are deferred on IRA contributions, but when you withdraw the funds, they're taxed as regular income, not investment income. (It's apparently a net gain if you can set this up early in your career.) Mitt will be legally required to begin withdrawing money from the fund when he's 70. I keep thinking "What if he's trying to get the tax rate down by then?" It'd be a weird reason to run for president.

How difficult would it be for an independent/minority party to get into party. Not a majority position, but a role of influence. Is the system too stacked towards the two party system these days? and American politics doesn't need a single third party; it needs four parties.

So, the problem with the US' party system is that it is stacked against third parties in a variety of ways.

One, a political party in the US must qualify state by state. Each state has its own rules on how a third party can get "qualified" status, meaning that it has, usually, a significant number of people enough to count as an actual political party rather than as a bunch of weirdos who decided to form their own club. These hoops are difficult to get through because they require the time to go out and organize people under the new party, time, making sure the people actually register as the new party, and paperwork. Doing this 50 times, jumping through different hoops each time, would be a monumental effort. Keeping people's interests high enough would also be difficult; in California if your registered number of voters drops below a certain point you lose your status. When I was working for the elections department in California from 2000-2004 we only had three "third-party" parties, the American Independent Party, the Green, and the Reform parties.

Two, you'll never see a big, off-shoot of one party into a third party because as much as the Goldwater Republicans might wish they could kick out the Religious Right or the Tea Partiers from the GOP, removing those votes from their party would basically hand any and all elections over to the Dems based on the election rules, as Finagle pointed out. Because of that, they'd rather swallow their distaste for each other, hold their nose, and vote alongside them, which is the only reason I can think of why GOProud and the Log Cabin Republicans are with them.

People keep saying that Mittens has lost the election based on that secret video. The people who are saying that don't get that video isn't going to turn off anyone who was going to vote for him to begin with. Many, many conservatives I've talked to feel aligned with the opinions he put forward.

@RenThing -- elections aren't won with just your base, it really depends on how many of the swing voters you can get in battleground states. The reason the pundits are saying Mitt's lost the election for this -- an aside, isn't this the second or third time they're saying it? -- is it reinforces the narrative of Mitt not caring about the middle class and poor Americans and having a rather simple-minded take on foreign policy. The GOP and Teabaggers will vote team Romney for the most part, but his serial stupidity on the campaign trail is pushing more of the undecideds away and firing up the Democratic base. If the election looks like a lost cause, Republicans will stay away in droves on voting day making this even worse to be developing at point in the timeline.

There's no time for a campaign reset and it's increasingly looking like Obama is pulling away. Pundits are saying Romney needs the debates to swing his way, but that's being said to keep the news audience engaged -- we've seen Romney during the primaries struggling to get ahead of a complete pack of morons, we've seen him in past debates getting slammed by people like Ted Kennedy, and I don't imagine he'll transform into someone who can effectively and clearly beat Obama in any of the formats or topics set up.

I actually don't think the 47% thing will explode his campaign, as it seems pretty clear that there are more people voting against Obama than for Romney. At least that's what it seems like to me. But Romney is really doing a shitty job at courting the independents and undecided. The convention, which was supposed to make him out to be a warm, fuzzy teddybear saviour of the economy failed. The whole thing ended with fact checkers crying, people confused at him saying that he'd be looking out for the very people that his policies will alienate and me wanting to give him a gold star for at least TRYING to emote. Not to mention Clint Eastwoods surreal speech and Sen. Marco Rubio's scary christian rant.

A question, and forgive the ignorance on it but I'm not too up to date but...if Romney won will there be much change? By that I mean will it be, like Obama, another four years of cockblocking? It's been frustrating to see Obama's attempts at bridging the gap between the two parties in order to get some shit done shot down simply because he's a democrat and with Romney not really showing many signs of a desire to bridge that gap will it just be democrats stopping Romney for the hell of it?